Wednesday, February 06, 2008

Ken Norris’ Going Home

MONTREAL WINTER, 1982

Snow was falling. Snow was always falling.I was looking out the window,watching it fall. In my headI was still dreaming of South Seas islands,my new spiritual home.If I didn’t get out of that room soonthe snow would erase me.In a while I’d hop on a busand ride into town down to Clark Street,for another night of not knowingwhat was happening at all, another cold nightof sleeping on Ruthie’s couch.But the snow was persistently falling,and the islands were far away,calling to me, calling my name.

In the poems in this collection, Norris (who has been teaching at the University of Maine in Orono since 1985) returns to New York (where he was born), and to Montreal (where he spent his formative poetry years and still considers home), alongside poems that make reference to a very post-9/11 consideration, referencing the wars in the middle east.

MORNING IN MONTREAL

It’s good to get out from underthe CNN flood of information,the flood of propaganda.

After a whileyou start to mistake that shitfor reality.

It’s good to see Norris write outside of himself and his immediate world, and his increasing past, as one of the 1970s Vehicule Poets. Norris keeps moving his poems through various of his concerns, from the geographies of home and history, to his annual trek to the south seas (one of his strongest collections is about such a trip, his 1984 Coach House Press book, edited by bpNichol, The Better Part of Heaven), his daughters and poems for ex-girlfriends and ex-wives, long fallen by the wayside. But still, there are even a series of poems that almost don’t need to write themselves, boiled down to the two lines of the poem “JOURNEY THROUGH THE PAST,” that writes “They tore that building down / years ago. It belongs / to a Montreal that no longer exists.” (p 143), or the short piece “POEM,” saying a variant of what the whole of the collection is saying:

POEM

You can’t go home again,you can’t go back to the armsof the women who loved you.One or two of them still might take you in,but that would be nostalgia, not romance.

The future is unknown, and memoryis a nice blanket to wrap yourself up inin winter. But mostly you needto look ahead, to look outthe window, to see what isand isn’t there.